In the garden of liquid time, the flower symbolizing hope suddenly began to tremble violently, as if touched by some force. Its petals, ravaged by a strong wind, fluttered down like a shower of flowers.

These petals slowly drifted down in mid-air, eventually landing on the ground. Instead of withering like ordinary flowers, they quickly solidified into tiny hourglasses. These hourglasses were completely transparent, and the sand inside shimmered faintly, as if containing the endless power of time.

Lin Yue stood in the midst of this rain of flowers, her eyes drawn to these strange hourglasses. She couldn't help but stretch out her fingers, wanting to touch the glowing sand.

However, just as her fingertips touched the gravel, the watchtower's alarm system suddenly went off without warning. The shrill siren echoed throughout the garden, nearly piercing one's eardrums.

At the same time, the seventeen-colored gemstones on the watchtower, as if triggered by some mechanism, burst into a dazzling light. Like lightning, this light shot straight at Lin Yue, pinning her shadow firmly to the digitized glass curtain wall.

"Unknown narrative frequency detected!" Lu Li's data form twisted into a vortex of data flow, and golden code poured out like a rainstorm. "The quantum lock of the memory archive has been forcibly broken, and time crystal number 777 is collapsing!"

Sparks flew from the calico cat's gear collar. As it leaped onto the console, the parts swept by its tail hovered in the air in a strange Möbius strip. On the holographic screen, dots of light representing various universes connected at a frantic pace, forming chains. Each connection was entwined with dark red data streams, like the blood vessels of some unknown civilization.

"It's an evolved form of the time parasite!" Lin Yue's notebook automatically unfolded. The blank pages were no longer filled with words, but with patterns of multiplying parasitic spores. "They've learned to exploit the fragility of time crystals."

When everyone arrived at the archives, the sight before them was breathtaking. The once dazzling array of time crystals had been reduced to a blood-red cage, with countless translucent worms writhing within, gnawing away the stored memories into grayish-white fragments. As Lin Yue entered the core area, fragments of a childhood picnic with her parents suddenly exploded before her eyes—but in the image, her father had sprouted tentacles, and her mother's pupils had transformed into spinning clocks.

"These aren't illusions!" The calico cat dug its claws into the ground, and its gear collar wailed. "They're materializing contaminated memories!"

An emergency meeting was convened in the Arbitration Tribunal's Quantum Conference Room. A representative from the steampunk universe, his prosthetic eyes oozing black oil, declared, "Our historical archives are being reverse-engineered. Queen Victoria's statue is beginning to flow with liquid time." A representative of Cybertron's metallic lifeforms transformed into a stream of data and crashed into the conference table, reassembling with three eerie cracks. "Our Allspark has detected a spacetime virus that will tamper with civilization's memories, transforming them into parasitic forms."

Lin Yue gripped the original thread of time tightly, but it suddenly twisted wildly, leaving bleeding wounds on her palm. The Dream Weaver's voice pierced through time and space, trembling with an unprecedented intensity: "Deep in the time rift...something has awakened."

By cross-referencing massive amounts of anomalous data, the team pinpointed the source of the contamination—a mysterious organization calling itself the "Time Tracers." Their base lies hidden in the center of a parallel Earth, where magma flows with liquid code and suspended pendulums are engraved with wriggling parasitic spores. When Lin Yue's drone transmitted the footage, the entire arbitration tribunal fell into a dead silence. At the core of the base, twelve black-robed figures surrounded a massive hourglass, their faces constantly shifting. They were all members of the "Entropy Club," former memory restoration experts.

"They're parasitic!" Lu Li's mechanical fingers crushed the edge of the operating table. "Those worms have tampered with their wills, tempering hatred and obsession into new weapons."

Even more terrifying discoveries followed. The encrypted files cracked by the calico cat revealed that the Time Traversers' ultimate goal was to activate the "Narrative Zero Project"—using contaminated time crystals to rewind the entire universe's memory to before the Entropy Club incident, completely thwarting the empathy network. The key to activating the device was none other than the seventeen-colored gemstones found in Lin Yue's notebook.

As Lin Yue's team prepared to infiltrate the Earth's core base, the Dreamweaver suddenly appeared. Its threads of time dimmed like a dying candle, and its edges gradually disintegrated into points of light. "I will infuse your gem with my final strength. But remember, the true weapon... lies within those tainted memories."

The battle deep within the Earth's core was beyond imagination. A giant python, formed from liquid code, entangled Lu Li and dragged him into a pool of magma. The calico cat, its geared collar corroded by parasitic spores, let out a dying wail. Lin Yue confronted the Time Tracer leader, but froze the moment he lifted his hood—it was his parasitic alter ego, his eyes burning with crimson data streams, his hand clutching the blood-stained thread of the origin of time.

"Do you think those broken memories are weaknesses?" The parasite's voice was mixed with the roars of countless people, "They are the sharpest knives!" Before the words fell, Lin Yue's childhood memories turned into chains to bind her, and her parents' faces twisted into those of time travelers, stabbing the blade of time at her.

At the critical moment, Lu Li's broken mechanical arm grasped the chain, and the sparks that flew ignited Lin Yue's fighting spirit. She suddenly remembered the Dream Weaver's words and sank her consciousness deep into her memory. There, she saw the fragments of hope left by countless empaths—the smile of a terminally ill girl running for the first time in a virtual adventure, the last birthday of a lonely old man with his virtual family. These warm points of light converged into a torrent, shattering the parasite's attack.

Seventeen-colored gems radiated a cosmic light, merging with the primordial thread of time. Lin Yue poured energy into the hourglass, triggering a sharp wail from the time parasites, and the black robes of the time-traversers crumbled to ash. When the last spore was purified, the core base collapsed, and everyone scrambled out of the shattered spacetime.

After this battle, a new accord was reached across the multiverse. The Memory Archive established a "dual narrative" mechanism, preserving both the light and shadow sides of each precious memory. Lin Yue's notebook evolved into a living being, and the seventeen-colored gems transformed into a defensive barrier when danger approached. And deep within the garden of liquid time, a new sprout broke through the ground, its vines entwined in a never-ending circle—a symbol of the reconciliation between paradox and order.

On a quiet night, Lin Yue sat alone in the watchtower. A calico cat curled up on her lap, and a dazzling array of data transformed into a starry sky, casting a shadow all around. As the thousandth moon rose, her notebook swirled silently, a line of light appearing on the blank page: "In the cracks of memory, the possibility of new life is forever growing." And in a more distant dimension, a primitive civilization, newly exposed to the empathic network, was carving its first question, filled with doubt and curiosity, into the universe's narrative.

(End of Chapter 63)